Behold the lie

I fear I will turn to maggots

Untitled from Archive by Joyce Lee

The Lie

Her body was part-whale, part-mouse—behold the lie!  
It lives in your belly. Like an unborn baby you mould the lie. 
   
Slice my ears with the jagged stars. What did you ever do  
with the gift of music? I buried the violin and told the lie. 
   
This lamp in the ocean. A wolf with feathers for fangs. The woman who bares   
her wrist like a rumour. Nothing will change. Try it—kiss, kill, scold the lie. 
   
I fear I will turn to maggots swelling in the rain. I run from clouds  
caging your form. I have lost, though once I thought I controlled, the lie. 
   
“No one can see us.”—“The sun is smoke in my city.”  
You do not need eyes for (there is no blindfold!) the lie. 
   
Most of the time I laugh at misfortune. I am mad, you are mad—come,   
are we both not too old for the leash? For once, with me, uphold the lie. 
   
Day breaks, night falls, time eats itself like a cannibal in heat. You will burn to black  
in the Universe’s marriage with Nothing. What ever remains but the cold, the lie? 
   
Am I forgiven, my Lord? Place the gun on my cheek like a mother’s hand.   
I begged at your feet for the fortune of faith. You, Dear One, sold the lie. 
   
It writhes in my gut, a worm in my blood, a bird in my groins.   
No, no! A song, a scarf, a horse, milk, the sea, a marigold—the lie. 
   
Tonight, I will leave for the mountains, I will leave for the river. I will leave,  
Shannan. Stay a while in the thirteenth hour of memory, please—hold the lie. 

Note on Art

Joyce Lee’s artwork¹ felt like the perfect visual companion to this ghazal². The skeleton draped in ribbon, bursting with pearls, caught mid-laugh or mid-scream, crowned with golden teeth—it’s got that same energy of ornamentation over emptiness, beauty as a kind of defiant costume we wear over the truth of our bones.

There’s also something in particular about that pink bow—so delicate, so deliberately placed—that echoes for me the form of the traditional ghazal itself as an obsession with transformation and disguise. We’re all chimeras, all impossible composites, are we not? The skeleton knows it. The speaker knows it. God, too, must be aware. As well as Death, and the devil, and all that is dark and holy.

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1. Image: Untitled © Joyce Lee. Used for editorial commentary purposes only. All rights reserved.

2. This poem was first published in Plenitude Magazine, a lovely Canadian lit mag that has homed, now, three of my ghazals if I’m remembering correctly!